Despite Pressure After Shootings, Little Changes at the State Level

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Christopher Liberatore kneels in prayer in Littleton, Colo., Close

When school shootings rock the country, state lawmakers feel the reverberations more directly than most public officials. Parents of victims pressure them to tighten gun control laws, while gun owners remind their representatives that no law can stop a madman bent on a killing rampage.

Acute sensitivity to those emotions hasn't rallied those legislators to crack down on guns, however. In Pennsylvania and Oregon, the state legislatures didn't make major changes to their gun laws after shootings in their states. Even after Columbine -- the worst school shooting in U.S. history before the tragedy Monday at Virginia Tech -- the Colorado legislature didn't tighten gun show rules.

Supporters of gun control say too many people assume that lawmakers will respond to the killings with stricter laws, so they don't take up the fight themselves. Opponents say supporters fail at manipulating tragedies for political gain.

Within hours after Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people in Blacksburg, Va., some lawmakers in the Old Dominion State started discussing gun control.

"We need to have a good conversation about how we allow people to purchase firearms, who we're allowing to purchase firearms and where (we're) allowing those firearms to be carried," state Sen. Jeannemarie Devolites Davis told a reporter on WTOP radio Tuesday.

Yet, if similar conversations in other states are any indication of Virginia's future, not much is going to get done. In October, Charles Carl Roberts IV walked into a one-room schoolhouse near Lancaster, Pa., shot and killed five female students, wounded several others and then killed himself. The horrific event didn't change the mood in Harrisburg, much to the frustration of Democratic state Rep. Dan Frankel. The supporter of tighter gun control conceded this wasn't surprising.

"The gun lobby is very powerful in Pennsylvania," he explained. "And it affects both caucuses."

Frankel said he once introduced an amendment to increase the felony level for receiving stolen weapons to the same as that for receiving other stolen goods. The voting board lighted up with green with "yes" votes, he recalled, until it became clear that the NRA didn't support the measure. Then, he said, the board went red, and the provision was defeated. The National Rifle Association declined to comment.

He lamented the gun control lobby's lack of grass-roots strength or political money to make a difference. "They've got to be able to show that they've got political muscle and what I call spilling political blood, for a change," he said.

Michael Hammond, a spokesman for the group Gun Owners of America, said, "States, which by and large like gun control, will enact more gun control as a placebo, … and states that are pro-freedom will remain pro-freedom."

Pennsylvania's experience closely mirrors what happened in Colorado after the 1999 Columbine shootings, in which 12 students and a teacher were killed. Lawmakers failed to close the "gun show loophole" by passing a law requiring background checks at gun shows. Instead, voters petitioned it onto the ballot in 2000, and it passed with more than 70 percent of the vote.

Oregon voters also had to take matters into their own hands after lawmakers failed to close a gun show loophole after a school shooting in 1998. The ballot measure closing the loophole passed with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Brian Malte, state legislative director for the Brady Campaign, worked with gun control supporters in Colorado and Oregon. "Because of the ballot initiative process, we said, … 'If (officials) don't act, we will take it to the voters,'" he said.

Supporters fail, he explained, because people do not press hard enough for change. "A lot of people assume that because it's such a terrible tragedy, something is going to change. But the NRA and the gun lobby get in there and muck things up," Malte said.

As for what could happen in Virginia, Pennsylvania's Frankel suggests that gun control supporters "marshal the grass roots. Legislators can't do it on their own."

But Hammond said there's a reasonably good chance that the commonwealth will remain pro-gun. "Obviously, there's a big effort being made to use this for political advantage," he said. "In the wake of Columbine, that didn't work."

I don't own a gun. I don't even like guns. They are vile and they can kill people. But I believe that history has shown us, more times than we care to consider, that an unarmed society is soon an extinquished society. Sometimes, I feel it is my duty as an American, to own a gun and learn how to use it should someday we be invaded by a foreign power - or even terrorists.

I've heard the tired old rhetoric, "We fight over there so we don't have to fight here." What's the matter with you? Don't you want to defend your country? They point to Spain and to the UK where terrorists have struck and then say "SEE!!" but what I see is are unarmed societies vulnerable to bullies in turbins. What happened shortly after 9/11 (not quickly enough in my opinion)? We attacked Afghanistan in the hopes of wiping out Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban! But, we were led astray by an idiot chasing a rabbit down a hole.

Can you imagine such a bombing in a New York Subway occurring and some Muslim faction taking credit for it? Now, put yourself in the shoes of an "innocent" muslim student in NYC or NJ. Our "gun-toting society" would start killing off muslims left and right and in short order. AND THEY KNOW IT! There are many hundreds of thousands of muslims living in the US. They fear the gun-toting Americans and with good reason. Imagine if we surrended our guns like they did in the UK or Spain!